When we get an order for a Flash banner, our design staff tends to have a variety of reactions ranging from sighs, to moans, to incomprehensible rants to uncontrollable fits of laughter. Our official policy on Flash (and our reply to the order) is simple:

“We don’t work with Flash. Sorry.”

We never jumped on that bandwagon. Never have. Never will.

This is what your Flash banner - or your Flash website - looks like to me. Many of your potential customers block Flash.

Back in the prehistoric internet days, all animated banners were gif format – and they mostly sucked. They were primitive looking, bandwidth heavy, uninspired junk. Flash came along and solved that problem for a  short time. They were lighter and the animation was much smoother, so you got a lot more bang for your 14kb (the standard size then) bandwidth buck. Naturally, many banner designers jumped on this and, since there are far more bad “banner designers” than good ones, Flash banners became equally primitive looking, even more bandwidth heavy, even less inspired junk. The solution became the problem.

This wasn’t really Flash’s fault. The bad designers saw that they could churn out bad banners in Flash format far more quickly, easily and cheaply than they could in gif format – and that is what brought about the cheap, bulk produced banner designs we so often see today.

I’m not saying that all Flash banner designers are bad. I’ve seen some brilliant Flash banners made by some great designers who charge premium rates for their efforts and deserve every bit of it. I’m not saying Flash is bad either. Its great for some things: multimedia display interfaces, online games, some interactive elements in websites, etc.  What I am saying is that unless you have an appropriate budget and can afford to hire the best, you are far better off with a great gif banner than a bad Flash banner. I’m also saying, as a side note, that you should never even consider using Flash as the main platform for your website design if your website is sales/service focused or informational. .

Why to avoid using Flash for banners:

Bandwidth

People spend almost no time looking at a banner before they decide to click or not. Nobody is going to spend any time at all staring in awe as your company logo slowly floats across a Flash banner. Nobody cares that much. You need to get your branding and your message across fast. Very fast. Typical size for a gif banner is less than 40kb  – and there is very little that can be done with a Flash banner using the same amount of bandwidth. Flash banners are usually (very) kb heavy, and people will typically have already clicked on a well made gif banner before that bloated Flash banner has even started to load.

A growing number of people block Flash

I do. I don’t see any Flash in any of the browsers I use unless I want to.  The only time I want to is when I’m looking for entertainment (and for a great example of Flash-driven entertainment, check out HeroMachine 2.5, which killed most of my morning). If I’m looking to buy something or if I’m looking for information, I don’t have time for Flash and I’m not going to bother to enable it when I can just click off and go somewhere else where it is easier to get what I’m looking for. With banners, people who block flash simply won’t see your ad. Some hosts try to solve this problem by requiring gif format “fall-back banners” that will display if Flash is not enabled.  Many Flash banner designers provide the gif fall-back banner as an afterthought with no effort to make it high quality – and all your Flash-blocked viewers ever see is the bad fall-back banner. Why not just skip the whole overly complex, ridiculous fiasco and get a good gif banner in the first place?  If I am paying for advertising, I don’t want to take any chances that I’m wasting my money. Losing even one sale just because a qualified buyer didn’t see my ad means I’m doing something very wrong.

Flash is  pointless for most banners

Except for highly creative, big budget banner campaigns, there is not much Flash can do that gif can’t do as well or better when it comes to banners. The average individual does not have a big budget, and the average banner designer is not highly creative. Typical lower-end Flash banners are just the same as bad gif banners – but made with Flash. They don’t offer any additional benefits. People don’t click on them more often, they load more slowly, and they often don’t even get seen.

As long as your gif banners are well made (and care should be taken with that since there are plenty of bad gif banner designers around as well) , your advertising budget is much better spent on gif format banners if you want the best possible ROI.

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